Thursday, November 30, 2017

All these years and I’m
still not accustomed to my face. If I met myself in a crowded elevator I’d
probably think the guy looks slightly familiar but then again….

There is a face in the
mirror but it hasn’t registered with me. When I shave I see a chin, a neck, a
nose (still in the middle of it all)… the sections but not the aggregate.

I’m often confusing faces.
When we watch a movie at home I’ll say to Peggy how this guy looks like Cary
Grant and she’ll tell me he looks more like Ulysses Grant.. Of course I could
tell Danny de Vito from George Clooney or Woody Allen from Kobe Bryant.
But young Pacino looks to me like young De Niro and ten other people. I just recently found out that John Hurt, William Hurt and William Hurd are not the same person.

I am your classic
unreliable witness. Thirty years ago I was held up at gun point in my pharmacy
by a crazed drug addict. I gave him what he came for; even offered to gift wrap
it for him to get him out of the store. He was so pleased by my service he
returned a few months later. Even called me by name as if we were old friends.
He was a white guy with an afro hair style. All I saw was the gun and the hair.

When he was caught I was
asked, along with about ten others, to pick him out of a police line-up. Of
course I nailed the wrong person…as did 2 other victims. Fortunately they
arrested him anyway and he was convicted no thanks to me.

When I met Peggy in 1980
she was sitting alone during my poetry reading at the old Venice jail. During
intermission I went over to her and greeted her a loud HELLO…as if I’d just
recognized an old friend. I have no idea what prompted that. Maybe I confused
her with Ava Gardner. Or maybe I had read my life story and knew this was the
woman I would marry in a few years.

In Pharmacy College I was
one of 150 students. The highpoint of my time spent in that drab institution
was in my sophomore year. By then I realized that just about everyone cheated
on exams. The fraternities had the test before-hand. In fact the same questions
had been passed down from the previous decade. A few of us chose not to join any frat. One
day a classmate came up to me after a midterm test.

You are Wolitsky, aren’t you?

No, I’m Levine.

Damn, I just copied the whole exam from you.

Not to worry, I copied from Wolitsky.

That proved to me I had a
common face, easily mistaken for Wolitsky and probably a dozen others. In fact
maybe that impostor in the elevator really is Wolitsky. Where are you now
Wolitsky? I want to see what I look like.

Monday, November 20, 2017

Never been in one but I’m
glad they’re there. I imagine these are great places for co-conspirators to
meet during the spin cycle with plans to rig an election. If you came to launder
money your limo made a wrong turn. This may be where John Le Carre does his best
writing. Insomniacs can congregate and bore each to sleep or watch single socks
slither out the door…and then show up in a yard sale next month. Those round
windows remind me of early television screens by Philco or Zenith. Who does
their laundry in the wee hours? Maybe folks on their way to early Mass or
nurses coming home on the graveyard shift or some guy who spilled ketchup on
himself while eating at an all-night diner.

Which brings me to one of
those, We Never Close, eateries. I
won’t mention the name but it rhymes with Hell. They call themselves a
Drive-In. After having lunch there last week I’d like to drive my car right
through the place. Peggy and I thought to give it a try around 3 o’clock. P.M.
that is. I can think of five reasons why we’ll never return. The soup was cold.
The service, non-existent. Prices were immodest. The air conditioner made us
feel we were in Costco’s meat locker. And most egregious was the hundred
decibels blaring from the juke- box with a continuous loop of rock
music enough to percuss our ears, jangle our nerves and numb our brains. When Sinatra came on for
one number with, Strangers in the Night,
I thought the torture was over but it then resumed. I was yearning for John
Cage’s, 4’, 33” of silence.

The place must be a
truck-stop for big rigs headed to San Francisco. Maybe the cacophony along with
the frigid air is intended to re-charge their adrenalin for the next 500 miles.

CVS pharmacies are another
one with their lights on in this city that never sleeps. Are these for shoppers
who hate crowds? Or suddenly woke up in a panic because they ran out of Q-tips
or One-A-Day vitamins? My guess is the pharmacist during the day leaves all the
routine paper work for the poor sucker on the night shift.

I was a stranger in the
night once or twice. The occasion was cramming for final exams in college.
Along with two friends I rode the subway through the wee hours in order to stay
awake, memorizing structural formulas and botanical origins for a course called
Materia Medica. We stuffed our heads with a glossary of name from rhizomes and roots to the inner rind of fruits. None of it had the slightest relevance to my life as a pharmacist
counting and pouring. Could it be, at the midnight hour, white sheets from the laundromat floated over to the pharmacy like ghosts of alchemical ancestors over a smoky cauldron to
do their sorcery in the dark shadows of a CVS all-night inner sanctum? Could it be? I doubt it.

Friday, November 17, 2017

There is no word for it.
Those long moments when you are not quite asleep but not awake either. The
clock says 2:14 and the next time you peek it is 2:57 and then 3:41 yet you
could swear only five minutes have passed. I’ve been told whatever you do,
never look at the clock. Therefore I do.

On the board game of sleep
you are stuck at Yawns. And that was
hours ago. The next station is Snores
or at least a snort and chortle. You’re waiting for Uber to take you to
Dreamsville. But instead your arm itches. Your leg twitches. You’re hot. You’re
cold. A car alarm goes off four blocks away. Did you forget to take the clothes
out of the dryer? There goes a motorcycle revving its engine.

Now you are traveling back
to 1943 when your friends would look up at the sky and say B-52 or Lockheed P-38;
how they could identify airplanes or cars by the grill or talk about
carburetors…….and you knew not a thing nor cared a hoot about any of this. But
why dwell on that in the middle of the night?

Dreams are a collage of
debris, shards of broken pots or pot holes as if floating in inner space.
Unresolved moments. Fears materialized. Where did I park my car? Will I miss my flight? Here is my father turned into Spencer Tracy who becomes
Barack Obama. And then there’s the mystery of why the cool side of the pillow
is the one facing down.

There is no predicting a
night’s sleep. Some nights are seamless with dreams of exotic flowers strewn
around on a path of rolling hills like the belly of a giggling Buddha. Other
nights feel endless punctuated by a restless bladder and dreams of a besieged
pharmacist in a flu epidemic with screaming babies, six phones ringing and a
broken keyboard.

It’s a bone-brain thing.
Those hours in the nether world of half-sleep seem to be a misalignment. The
body is bone-weary but the brain thinks it is 2 P.M. instead of A.M. Eyes close
but synapses are buzzing. Peggy uses Azerbaijan as a mantra. I wish some word
would transport me to a third world country even if I’d be looking for my
parked car.

It is now 4:03; too late to
reach for a Melatonin, too early to rise. I’ll just stay put reviewing my
entire life starting with carburetors, manifolds, fly wheels and gaskets…all
those strange words which already are putting me to sleep. Here I am drifting
off. But not quite.

I had a breakthrough dream
last month. I suddenly discovered myself sitting in the car that I was looking
for. I think I was in the back seat. Uber me home.P.S. I have now been told that there is a word for that half-waking, half sleeping consciousness. It's called a hypnagogic state. I learn something every day and if I hadn't written this down I'd have forgotten by now.

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Oops, wrong homonym. Be
careful Donald. America is great because America grates.

The dictionary defines the
word, grate, as

1-To reduce a substance to small pieces

2-To make a rasping sound

By his very presence he
has concentrated the national consciousness as a negative model by shredding the
culture of male dominance till it screeches with the toppling of predators.

It is certainly no
coincidence that the president’s female grabbing, revealed during his campaign,
has led to the fall of Harvey, Kevin, Louis et al along with Roy Moore. The
sound you are hearing is the crumbling of the patriarchy.

Credit Trump with this
single accomplishment…unintended as it is. A nation nominally led by such a vulgar,
narcissistic miscreant ignites an equal and opposite response. Call it revolution,
American style. It took a Donald to rouse us from our slumber.

Now if we could only
extend the outrage to his dismantling of government agencies, bellicose prattle
and abject ignorance of climatologists we could further demonstrate the
greatness of our democracy.

Sometimes it takes a
tragic misstep in history to make us see with clarity and redress the
grievance. The election in 2016 was one such event.

One hundred years earlier
an Irish rebellion was put down. The British executed leaders of the uprising.
Out of that tragic event William Butler Yeats wrote his poem, Easter 1916. The recurrent line in the
piece is, A terrible beauty is born. The
death of the revolutionaries had a reverse effect on the Irish people. The militants
became martyrs and the movement was reinvigorated.

So too, the Trump presidency
has seemingly consolidated the opposition. Aterrible beauty is born out of the
grating, the mass shootings, nuclear brinkmanship abroad, and threats to health
of our planet. It’s the only one we’ve got.

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

I was the unintended outcome of a chemical reaction
by a mad scientist in a subterranean laboratory. A precipitate in the bottom of
a beaker, left in the wilderness to be suckled by wolves and then deposited in
a shopping cart in front of a 99 cent store. Or so it seemed.

The great thing about being bereft is that you get to
make up a lot of stuff. My mother actually had five brothers who lived in the
Bronx. My father had four half-siblings who lived in Brooklyn. I don’t think
the boroughs ever met. It should be noted that four half-siblings are not two people.

In any case these nine uncles and aunts yielded cousins
by the dozens …none of whom did I know. They are out there somewhere. If, by
chance, cuz, you happen to read this please contact me especially if there’s an
inheritance involved. If, on the other hand, I owe you money, forget about it.

I have a dim memory of maternal grandfather, Morris,
who lived with us. When he died I was about six. At that point my mother stopped
talking to her brothers. It had something to do with who was to pay for his
tombstone.

My father’s father was destitute and given to drink.
After being widowed he passed along my father, Sam, at age three, to an aunt
who raised him. Grandpa Lou then remarried and had four more children... at least three of them brought up in as wards of the state. The
first-born was a boy he also named Sam, possibly in a drunken stupor or memory
lapse. Sam, meet your brother, Sam.

My favorite cousin, whom I last saw about 78 years
ago, is Mildred, daughter of Nettie & Irving. She would now be pushing 90
and happily unmarried. Whenever referred to in family lore she was known as
Mildred-Who-Never-Got Married. I’d like to think she was way ahead of time.

Perhaps Mildred was a gun moll or paramour,
hopelessly stuck on Bugsy Siegel or Mickey Cohen; in fact her last name was Cohen.
Or maybe Mildred was thoroughly Modern declaring her preference for same sex
union in a way that baffled Nettie and Irving.

When I was diagnosed with a motor neuron neuropathy
about thirty years ago my doctor asked if there was any family history of such.
The question prompted me to call my mother's last surviving sister-in-law.

Hello,
is this Aunt Anna? This is Norm. Do you remember me? How are you and my cousins? How
is Mildred?

You
know, she never got married.

Though I wouldn't know her if we met in a crowded elevator Mildred-Who-Never-Got-Married is my favorite because she stood up against the chattering conventions. She is a reminder of why I left New York. One July
week in 1954 I got my marriage license, pharmacy license and two tickets out of
La Guardia airport. I’m sure that cousins and other members of my tribe meant
well but nothing prepared me for relatives meddling or even whispering about my
choices in life.

My idea of family consists of my daughters and
step-son and family along with grand-children and one great. I would also include my step-niece
or is it step-second cousin, Karen. I also count my ex-brother-in-law who has become closer to me since my divorce. Come to think of it my clan is bountiful and keeps growing. I prefer to think of friends as family and
family as friends.

Saturday, November 4, 2017

Seems like most books I
read or movies I watch have, at their core, the issue of how to be OF this world but not altogether IN it. If there is an alt-universe there
are times I want to get myself on that queue. However my guess is we’re already
there. We live with one foot on the ground and the other perched in some
mid-distance elsewhere.

It’s the last train to Clarkesville / And I’ll meet
you at the station.

About thirty years ago
Peggy and I fell from the back of a bus on Oxford St. in London. We had
hesitated getting off and when it started up again we tumbled into traffic.
Sometimes I think we were killed that day and all these years are just the
beginning of our after-life. I could live or rather die with that.

So maybe I didn’t burn the
toast this morning...and the Dodgers didn’t go listless in that 7th
World Series game ….and Trump really isn’t President.

Show me the way to get out of this world / cause
that’s where everything is.

The operative word is
transcendence. How to lift off, find the metaphor, burst through the margins,
sometimes in an act of creative destruction. It may mean not only smelling the
flowers but also listening to them. It may entail finding connective tissue
that isn’t there, risk going crazy and it may be worth it.

One author (Jean Giono, Joy of Man's Desiring)) takes the
pastoral road into a bucolic world of farmers communing with animals in a
peaceable kingdom. Another writer (Richard Powers, Orfeo) sees the artist as a misunderstood fugitive
in flight from convention and a fearful populace.

I suspect we all, to some
extent, live inside our own paradigm, the one we’ve created in order to breathe
freely in Trumpdum. Outwardly we exist in this agreed-upon world. Yet at the
same time we inhabit that parallel one where Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto drowns
out the sum total of all his majesty’s Tweets.

All four-legged,
fin-legged, no-legged and winged creatures prance, slither, gurgle and flutter out
their days hearing their own sounds beyond our frequencies and know nothing
about the headlines that tremble us. Soon we may join them.

From pre-history on we
have sensed a glimpse of an imagined beyond. We love the mystery; that
unaccountable twinge felt when mad Uncle Abner dies three continents away or
the word succotash appearsin the newspaper at the moment it is
spoken on the radio or that dog whom your neighbor thinks is her deceased
husband having returned.

Conspiracy theories are
yet another way out of here. Page eleven of the rag at the check stand tells of
the half a mermaid discovered inside a tuna fish sandwich. On page twelve is a JFK
sighting or was it Jesus in the arrangement of cornflakes in the cereal bowl.

Next flight in ten
minutes. If I had my druthers (and when don’t we all have our druthers,
existentially speaking?) I’d book passage on Rauschenberg Airlines or board a
slow boat to China with a collection of William Trevor stories accompanied by a
bluesy sax to see me off. Anything will do for transport to that other
dimension, parallel or wobbly.

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

At some point a phrase
falls limp from exhaustion. One day it is pithy wisdom; the next day it’s bad
journalism or hollow string of words.

Q-Will you be ready for the big game tomorrow?

A-We’re going to leave it all on the field.

There’s no place like a locker
room for dead language to pile up. Athletes are great practitioners, answering clichéd
questions with clichéd responses.

Q-How did it feel hitting that home run?

A-I was just trying to make contact.

The sportswriter has a
deadline. He/she’s got twenty minutes to file the story, get the close-up, the quote,
the gem. But there is none. The player is numb. He hasn’t processed what just
happened.

Q- How was your approach facing that pitcher having
struck out in your last twelve trips to the plate.

A-I can’t hit and think at the same time. I live in
the moment. I just try to slow the game down and focus.

Professional sports is
theater, human drama in real time, sometimes rising to the level of experiential
art. It may be the only thing we don’t record. We want to see it live. Interviews
are weak tea, superfluous captions to what we witnessed. Incapable words.

Q-What went wrong tonight? Were you feeling fatigue?
How did it feel letting your team down?